As members of the infamous Velvet Underground, John Cale and Lou Reed knew Andy Warhol in a way few did. After all, their '60s proto-art band was very much a product of Warhol's Factory, right down to the banana peel on the album cover. Songs for Drella, a rare collaboration between these Undergrounders, is a hard-edged, elegiac look at Warhol, the man, the artist, the icon. In a performance staged for B.A.M.'s Next Wave Festival, Cale and Reed careen through Warhol's career with fourteen moody songs, painting a different picture of celebrity. From the young man suffocating in Pittsburgh ("Smalltown") to the superstar isolated by his own success ("Slip Away"), Songs for Drella strips away Warhol's notoriety to find a fragile genius, vexed by mortality and the burden of éclat: a story you'll never see in the pages of Interview. Cale and Reed's torn affection for Warhol infuses the songs with a complexity of emotion, rich, ambiguous and mercurial. Reed's harsh guitar work and Cale's more genteel piano underscores this artful conflict, as do their rangey vocals. Like Warhol's Images/Images/Images, Songs for Drella is worth repeating. --Steve Seid Preceded by: V Is for Violet by Tod Verow, an (accidental) homage to Warhol's Factory films. Progressing from the mid-'50s to the present, V tells the story of a young hustler and a starlet. The frantic camerawork records many an attired woman and male physique in jockey shorts, blasé yet ambitious in their posturing. Will a new Superstar emerge? Who knows?